Three Days in Can Tho and the Gap at Age Ten

The schoolyard in Can Tho in the last days of October has no stand. There is only a concrete surface, a few chalk lines, and a group of adults sitting in a circle discussing how to teach a six-year-old to touch a football for the first time in her life. Nobody writes a score on a board. Nobody starts a stopwatch. Over three days, from 23 to 25 October, the community football instructor training course of the 2026 programme, organised by the Vietnam Football Federation together with the Can Tho Football Federation and supported by UEFA and the AFC, pursues a goal so narrow it is easy to overlook: preparing adults to stand in front of girls aged six to nine, and to make them want to come back next time.

I read the announcement three times. The first time to look for numbers. The second time to look for names. The third time to be sure I had not missed something written so skilfully that it had become invisible. After three readings, all I carried away was a time frame and a location. No instructor is named. No trainee is named. No federation official is named. For an event about training human beings, the absence of human names is the largest gap in the entire document.

In 2026, when competitions froze, I wrote a piece about the empty seats at the Etihad and understood that football is made up as much of those who are absent as of those present. Six years later, on a schoolyard without a stand in the Mekong Delta, that feeling returns with one difference: this time the absent have never appeared at all. The girls of six to nine in Can Tho have no names, no shirt numbers, nobody recording the second they first touch a ball. The course talks about them while none of them sits in the room.

The curriculum, according to the announcement, has four layers. The first is principle: no emphasis on competitive results, encouragement of interest, a focus on happy and positive experiences, and the gradual development of movement skills alongside basic football skills. The second is tools: the principles of community football coaching, plus two mnemonics called SMILES and STEPS. The third is social context: a dedicated module on the barriers that keep girls away from football. The fourth is practice: lesson planning for a football festival, and task assignment after the course. It closes with a certificate of completion issued by the VFF.

STEPS, in the common usage of European coach education, is a tool for adapting sessions along five variables: space, task, equipment, people, speed. If that is the version taught here, trainees receive a differentiation tool rather than a fixed drill book, which matters practically on Delta schoolyards that are sometimes half the size of a seven-a-side pitch. SMILES is harder. The announcement does not say what its six letters stand for. Guessing would be invention, so I leave it as a silence: a code without a key.

Technically, refusing to put results first for the six-to-nine band is the correct choice, and correct in an entirely unoriginal way. In long-term athlete development, this is the FUNdamentals stage: where a child learns the alphabet of movement — running, jumping, balancing, hand-eye coordination — before learning sentences. Imposing competitive outcomes on a six-year-old is the equivalent of demanding fluent reading before phonics. The grassroots programmes of FIFA, UEFA and the AFC all place this principle on the first line. The Can Tho course sits exactly there on the curriculum map, and it deserves credit for not claiming to have invented it.

The most durable thing about those three days is not the three days but the borrowed curriculum. A three-day course ending in a certificate of completion sets a very low competence ceiling; it is an activation intervention, not a qualification. The entire operating logic rests on the cascade model: a few dozen instructors are trained, each returns to a school or a locality, and from there reaches hundreds of girls. Cascades have a structural weakness — fidelity decays at every transmission. The first teacher receives everything, the second passes on seven parts, and the child receives what is left. No monitoring mechanism has been announced to measure what is left. The imported curriculum is the real asset, but that asset only pays out if somebody checks whether it survived two pairs of hands.

Choosing Can Tho is a geographic signal. The map of Vietnamese women's football talent has historically been dominated by a handful of northern provinces; the Mekong Delta, with dense population and a strong school-sport tradition, has contributed modestly to the national age-group teams. The senior women's team reached its highest point in 2026 with a first World Cup appearance, and immediately after that peak came the familiar problem: the average age of the core rose while the replacement layer stayed thin. A programme for girls of six to nine sits eight to twelve years away from that team. That is the correct distance for a seed, and it is also why it is so easy to forget.

I once sat in a provincial stadium for a youth women's match, counted the spectators on one hand, and realised the stand was not empty because people did not love football. It was empty because nobody had been invited. A community instructor training course is, in the end, a way of inviting — inviting adults to organise, so that children have somewhere to go. An empty stadium is a diary written in dust; the schoolyard in Can Tho is a page with no writing on it yet.

The blind spot is at age ten. The programme is framed for six to nine, and the announcement names no bridge for the ten-plus group: no school competition, no club entry point, no pathway from festival to team. Globally, that is the most common failure mode of entry-level girls' programmes — high enjoyment, zero onward route. A nine-year-old plays at a festival, turns ten the next year, moves up a school level, and has nowhere to continue. She does not leave football because she is bored. She leaves because there is no team. Every pass is a whisper that only those standing in the right place can hear, and the community instructor's job is to teach a child where to stand — something that cannot be finished in three days, only begun.

Three further details in the announcement deserve a pause. First, a VFF certificate of completion is not an AFC coaching licence, and the text does not make the distinction; across member associations the two documents are routinely confused. Second, there is no section on child safeguarding: parental consent, insurance, codes of conduct for adults working with under-18s, all of which any programme involving young children should carry. Third, there is no trainee count, no coach-to-child ratio, no contact-hour figure, no budget, no target number of girls.

The money question is equally unanswered. The phrase "supported by UEFA and the AFC" is a diplomatic construction: it is compatible with cash funding, technical assistance, curriculum transfer, or in-kind support. In the region, this form usually means curriculum plus a contribution to educator costs, with the member association carrying delivery. A 2026 label placed on a course held in October of the previous year suggests an approved work plan ahead of deployment, a good sign; but if the funding commitment runs only in short cycles, the programme cannot accompany one cohort from six to thirteen — precisely the stretch where retention is won or lost. A six-year-old of 2026 exits the target band in 2029.

And here is where I want to be blunt. A fortress of sand built during a festival will look magnificent for exactly one festival. The lesson-planning module on football festivals indicates the intended delivery vehicle is a mass one-off event, not a sustained weekly training block. The two models differ in kind: festivals create emotion, weekly sessions create skill. Emotion needs one occasion. Skill needs two sessions a week, for years, with the same group of children and the same instructor. If nobody measures how many girls return after six months, the programme will not know whether it is building a fortress or building a statue.

This event should be read for what it is. It is a governance milestone packaged as news: grassroots activity is the currency with which continental confederations recognise member associations' development efforts. Public-opinion pressure on this event is nil. It will generate no debate cycle, nobody will be interviewed, nobody will be questioned. Its value lies in the opposite direction: where the public looks least is usually where the system needs most. I have followed Vietnamese women's football long enough to know its real turning points are rarely streamed live.

Those three days in Can Tho will not appear in any Sunday-night bulletin. But there is one thing I keep after years in the stands watching women's football: a national team is not born in a final, it is born in a schoolyard, on an afternoon when a six-year-old is no longer afraid of the ball. The only thing I want to know after this course is the names of three girls who came back a second time. Not the name of the person who opened it.